All of San Francisco’s rape victims deserve to have their kits tested

Police Chief Greg Suhr wants to focus on cases that can be prosecuted.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Like many cities, San Francisco has a backlog of untested rape kits for cases that can no longer be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations.

Unlike many cities, San Francisco’s district attorney’s office and its Police Department aren’t on the same page about how to handle this problem.

In response to a Chronicle story about his office’s controversial decision not to partner with the D.A.’s office to apply for two grants that would pay for the testing, Police Chief Greg Suhr said that he’d made the decision after consulting with the crime lab.

“We’ve spent the last year clearing our sexual assault kit backlog for cases that fall within the statute of limitations — cases that are potentially prosecutable,” Suhr said. “That’s been a tremendous dedication of resources, and we have no backlog for any of those cases now. But even though staffing is up at the crime lab, we’d have to outsource the testing of files that date from 2003 or earlier. These grants simply weren’t right for us at this time.”

The crime lab is still recovering from a number of staffing scandals, including the 2010 theft of cocaine evidence by a drug tester that led to nearly 2,000 criminal case dismissals to this year’s revelations that two staffers failed a DNA proficiency exam, risking hundreds more cases.

Suhr said that his office is committed to clearing the backlog of kits dating from 2003 or earlier.

“I’m not ruling out that we wouldn’t retroactively apply for one of the grants in question,” he said. “It’s just that I think the agencies that are applying for those grants, the ones who have prosecutable kits, are rightfully going to take priority.”

D.A. George Gascón’s office isn’t persuaded.

“The argument that this is too much of a bureaucratic problem to deal with, we just don’t buy that,” said spokesman Maxwell Szabo. “Especially for the first grant, some of the money was earmarked for tracking the inventory. And just because there’s difficulty in tracking the inventory, that isn’t an excuse not to test these kits.”

Our take? Suhr should definitely call the grant organizations and ask if San Francisco can still apply for these grants.

Rape victims deserve to have their kits tested, even if their cases are old. They endured the crime, they deserve the time.

Also, not all of the old cases necessarily fall outside of the statute of limitations — there are no limitations on rape cases that involve the use of a deadly weapon or kidnapping, for example.

Financial support of this kind doesn’t come around every day, either. San Francisco should apply for all the free money it can to fix this problem.

As for Suhr and Gascón, they’ve had lots of personal differences lately. This latest episode shows that it’s way past time for them to sit down, talk it through, and figure out how they can work together. Public safety depends on the good working relationship between these two offices.